Opinion | Ohio Republicans proposal to arm teachers is an act of cowardice

So Republican lawmakers in Ohio want to protect children from gun violence — with more guns.

Last week, in response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., and other high-profile episodes of mass murder, the Ohio legislature passed a bill allowing local boards of education to permit teachers to carry a firearm in the classroom, making it one of nearly 20 states to do so.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has indicated that he is eager to sign the bill into law. “I thank the General Assembly for passing this bill to protect Ohio children and teachers,” he said in a statement.

But proposals like this are nothing to celebrate. They are an act of cowardice.

It seems barely worth rehashing the reasons that arming teachers is not the way to end mass shootings.

The idea, ostensibly, is that a teacher with a gun could leap into action and disable or even kill a potential attacker. But research shows that in a shootout, even highly trained police officers are accurate less than half the time. There’s no reason to expect that a teacher with far less experience with guns could do better.

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Studies have also found no evidence that arming teachers would meaningfully protect against school shootings, and that armed adults frequently mishandle their own weapons on school grounds.

Plus, polling consistently finds that most teachers don’t want to be armed; they want to teach. Classrooms are supposed to be spaces of learning and growth, not places for “hardening.”

Yet the Ohio GOP would rather create an ouroboros of guns — mass shooters faced by teacher shooters who themselves shoot back, everyone armed to the hilt — than entertain the obvious and less convoluted solution: gun regulation that would keep deadly firearms out of the hands of potential killers, and out of our classrooms, in the first place.

That such suggestions are coming to the table at all tells us something significant about the state of our politics — and many of our politicians. As with so many national problems that need collective solutions, the GOP would prefer to shift the burden to individuals.

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Republican politicians want us to accept the idea that mass shootings will keep happening, that we should not even imagine that they might stop, and that there is nothing their work can do to help. Instead, it’s up to us — parents who buy bulletproof backpacks, students who perfect their ability to hide quietly under a desk and now teachers, drafted unwillingly into the fray — to alone defend ourselves and our children.

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Rarely has our national religion of individual responsibility been put to such bleak ends.

A hail of bullets from an AR-15 is not a weather event, unpredictable and unstoppable. And legislators’ hands are not, in fact, tied. But by spinning out fantastical visions of class monitors as marksmen, Ohio legislators are mirroring their national-level counterparts, and shirking their duty to make difficult decisions rather than offend their gun-lobby funders or alienate gun-addicted voters.

Opinion: Why nothing will change after Uvalde

Why practice courage when you can force a teacher to do it for you?

Certainly, some Americans are despairing enough to accept this abdication of duty as normal. After all, following tragedy upon tragedy, nothing has changed. To many people, our politics seem futile. As if it’s too much to expect a legislator to legislate.

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And others, of course, remain in the grips of a selfish gun sickness, in which the supposed constitutional right to bear military-grade arms outweighs a schoolchild’s actually inalienable right to life. These people would rather force a teacher to pick up a gun than willingly put down their own.

Opinion: Is there a sickness in U.S. culture? Yes: The GOP gun cult.

Proposing that we arm teachers to prevent school shootings is an abdication of common sense and legislative duty. Our response as citizens should not be to debate the merits of a stupid proposal and indulge it as a legitimate proposition. We should point it out for the foolishness that it is. We should reconsider the bias toward individual solutions that made such a proposal seem wise in the first place. And we should call out the spinelessness of the people behind it.

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